We live in cynical, hyperconnected times, and one remedy we rely on our cultural products to deliver now and again is genuine, unabashed sincerity.…
With its title referring to the scar left behind by a suicidal person who hesitates and fails to deliver a mortal wound, Selman Nacar’s…
There’s a pretty standard axiom about “knowing your audience” when it comes to writing; or in this case, documenting a renowned filmmaker. Cyril Leuthy’s…
The latest Vietnamese box office sensation from Victor Vu, one of the country’s most prolific directors, The Last Wife teases the gaping hole for…
Director George C. Wolfe’s biopic and period piece Rustin opens with recreations of several iconic Civil Rights-era scenes: Tougaloo College students and faculty doused…
Scanning the logline alone of Cord Jefferson’s American Fiction is enough to engender a double-take, although less for its audaciousness and more out of…
Brian Helgeland’s Finestkind is an evasive conundrum, a hodgepodge of augmented dramaturgy that very poorly traverses what should be electric genre terrain. Its general…
It’s 2023: Streaming has become the dominant form of mass culture consumption, handheld Internet access is ubiquitous, the rich have gained total hegemony over…
The issue at the heart of Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest is one of the oldest in the cinema: how does one represent…
Movies stamped with the HBO Documentary Films logo tend to fall into a very specific category of non-fiction image-making — a baseline level of…
In 1993, when the third edition of Japan’s biannually held Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival took place, no one could have foreseen the seismic…
“Camels are adored by their jockeys,” a Bedouin camel herder sings out to the snow-covered desert at the beginning of Abu Bakr Shawky’s Hajjan.…
We’ve just passed the one-year anniversary of Jean-Luc Godard’s death via assisted suicide. Those closest to him suggested his advanced age and ailing health…
“I shall. For it is a happy tale.” So begins the lurid odyssey of flesh reformed and soul remade, a marionette reanimated by its…
As in this past winter’s Knock at the Cabin, a would-be idyllic vacation serves as microcosm for fissures in the great American experiment, in…
A Chicken Run sequel is like an admission of defeat from Aardman Animations, as is the upcoming Wallace and Gromit film. They seem to…
Filmmaker Ava DuVernay is no stranger to explorations and dramatizations of injustice in her work. Journalist Isabel Wilkerson’s 2020 nonfiction book Caste: The Origins…
The Three Musketeers: Part I — D’Artagnan, the first of two entries as its title implies, is the French’s first major attempt at the…